All the Heat, None of the Flavor

There’s a rule of not fixing something if it isn’t broken. You can apply this to any number of media works, industries, or whatever else you can think of, but generally speaking once something is good, and successful, you don’t need to screw around with it unless something massive changes. And yes, sure, McDonald’s has, in recent months, noticed a serious downturn in their business due to rising costs, overpricing their product, and customers getting tired of paying so much for so little, but that’s not the fault, specifically, of the Sausage McMuffin sandwich.

This was something I thought about when I grabbed a Spicy Sausage McMuffin on a recent road trip. For the complete picture, when I went to the kiosk to order a quick breakfast – McMuffin, hashbrown, orange juice – I spotted the spicy version of the standard McMuffin. I don’t know exactly how long this thing has been out for, since I very rarely and awake early enough to get a fast food breakfast, but it was still labeled as “new” at the store I went to. I was lured in to try it because, hey, if nothing else it would make for a review for this site (this review right here), but I didn’t exactly have high hopes for the sandwich.

This is McDonald's, after all, and they aren’t exactly a restaurant known for their willingness to take risks. Whenever they release a new “premium” burger, for example, it’s always a variant of the old McDLT. “We put lettuce, tomato, and mayo on a burger! Isn’t that neat?” While Wendy’s is off to the side, kicking rocks and Burger King is violently motioning at their Whopper. When McDonald’s does it, suddenly it’s somehow new and fresh, even when it’s such a basic idea. A spicy sandwich sounds interesting, but just about every gas station convenience counter (Sheetz, Wawa, Circle K, et al) has one of these as well. And it’s McDonald’s; we can’t exactly expect it to be good and/or spicy, right?

So I ordered a Spicy Egg McMuffin… which the restaurant fucked up and gave me the Sausage McMuffin variant instead. I prefer ham over sausage, so I was already displeased. I was on the road, though, and not going down two miles to the next exit to turn around and drive back to make them make me a new sandwich. Instead, I ate the thing as it was and… eh, it was fine. Not great, not even good. Just fine. And there are plenty of reasons why, but the primary issue is the exact thing you’re getting the sandwich for: the spicy sauce.

To be clear, the Spicy Pepper Sauce (the official name for the goo) is actually spicy. It’s described as a mayo sauce with a spicy habanero kick, and I will admit it has some heat. Not enough to make my forehead sweat, but I felt just a little tingle on my tongue, which is more than I ever expect from McDonald’s otherwise. Legitimately, in the right context, this sauce could actually be good. The problem is that the Sausage McMuffin is not the right context for this sandwich at all.

The big problem is that when you bite into the sandwich all you taste is the Spicy Pepper Sauce. The standard Sausage McMuffin isn’t great, but it does have a certain flavor that you expect: a little bit of beige flavor from the egg (no better way to describe it, their eggs taste “beige”), the salt of the meat, the tang of their American cheese, all mixed together. Before trying this spicy version I wouldn’t have described that mix of flavors as being “delicate”, but apparently it actually is because if you mess with it in any way, the sandwich tastes far less interesting.

On the Spicy Sausage McMuffin, all you really get is spicy sauce and cheese. Partly this is due to how much the place I went to put on the sandwich. It was absolutely doused with sauce. But then, McDonald’s did make that big announce about how they were going to put more sauce on their sandwiches, so I’m going to take it at face value that the absolute slathering of sauce here was intentional and not a mistake on the restaurant’s part (unlike giving me the wrong version of the McMuffin entirely). The flavor of the egg was gone, I hardly noticed the sausage, it was all spicy mayo and cheese.

I guess that says a lot about the flavor of McDonald’s American Cheese because even with a metric ton of sauce on my sandwich, leaking out from all sides, I still tasted that tangy, fake cheese. I’m glad I did, too, because without it I would have had nothing but spicy mayo flavor in my mouth, and that would have been too much. You need something to cut through it and in this case that was the cheese. I just wish the egg and sausage had also had enough body to be tasted through all that sauce.

I didn’t find the sandwich wholly objectionable, mind you. I ate the whole thing (although I did end up wiping some of the excess sauce off on the wrapper). Only after finishing it did I think to turn it into a mashup and slap the hashbrown on there, add some more body to it to give it a better flavor profile. Still, I shouldn’t have to modify the sandwich to make it taste “good enough”, and that was what this thing needed. It was edible, but that’s as far as I’d go in describing it. Not good or great, just edible.

I do like that McDonald’s experimented, even if only on the mildest side of experimentation. Getting McDonald’s to put a spacy sauce on their breakfast sandwich is like telling Taco Bell to put their avocado sauce on their Doritos Locos Tacos – they already have all the ingredients there, so of course they could do it without any fuss. McDonald’s already had the Spicy Pepper Sauce sitting around for their Spicy McChicken, so this wasn’t even a big hardship for them. “Put this mayo we have in the back on something else as well? Eh, why not?”

There are applications where I think this mayo could be good, such as on their Breakfast Burrito or maybe on a Quarter Pounder. I don’t think the McMuffin is the right place for it. The flavors aren’t bold enough to stand out against the spicy mayo, and it leaves the sandwich feeling like less than the sum of its parts. Better to just enjoy this sandwich for what it is. If you’re wanting a spicy breakfast sandwich, there are places better at making and serving them than McDonald’s. This may be one of their rare experiments, but it’s not one of McDonald’s successful ones.